Michael Rundell is a lexicographer and linguist, now more or less retired. He was editor of several learner’s dictionaries of English, including the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and the Macmillan English Dictionary and he has published widely in the area of dictionaries for language learning. He is chair of the Expert Panel which adjudicates the A.S.Hornby Dictionary Research Awards. Email: michael.rundell@gmail.com

The Hornby Trust

Harold Palmer worked in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, teaching English to Japanese students. Puzzled by his students’ lack of progress, Palmer observed that they didn’t have much difficulty learning vocabulary, and the grammar of English wasn’t especially problematic either. Something else was holding them back from achieving fluency. “The obstacle to progress”, he believed, was “the existence of so many odd comings-together-of words” (Palmer 1933). He was talking about phraseology, syntactic preferences, and above all collocation — a concept he more or less discovered. For A.S. Hornby, another Brit teaching in Japan in the 1930s, Palmer was something of a mentor. Inspired by Palmer’s work on collocation, Hornby went on to create a new kind of dictionary aimed specifically at learners of English. The aptly titled Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary was published in Japan in 1942. But war intervened and Hornby was obliged to return to the UK, where his dictionary was re-published in 1948 as The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (or OALD). The OALD went on to become the most successful English learner’s dictionary of all time, selling tens of millions of copies. In 1961, Hornby set up the A.S.Hornby Educational Trust, using royalties from his dictionary to fund a programme of scholarships, research projects, training workshops and other initiatives, all geared towards improving the quality of English language education.

ASHDRA: funding for dictionary-related research

The A. S. Hornby Dictionary Research Awards scheme (ASHDRA) is a recent addition to the Hornby Trust’s portfolio, having launched in 2019. To quote its website, ASHDRA was set up to support “innovative research into areas of lexicography and dictionary use … within the field of English language education”, with the goal of bringing “clear practical benefits for learners of English”. Research projects might include looking at the way dictionaries are used in learning environments or developing new resources, for example in areas not covered by conventional dictionaries or in under-resourced contexts.

The ASHDRA awards operate on an annual cycle, and the next Call for Proposals will go out in January 2024. Since we launched the initiative in 2019, we’ve received dozens of interesting proposals, and so far we have made 11 awards to fund a very diverse range of projects. These include a research initiative exploring the reference needs of  Syrian refugees in Northern Ireland, with the goal of developing new dictionary resources to cater for their specific requirements; a trial version of a planned plurilingual dictionary for schoolchildren in West Borneo which would use the local “linguistic landscape” to engage students with the language(s) around them; a project to trial and develop a set of bilingual pocket electronic dictionaries for primary schools in South Africa, going between English and the students’ home languages; and a pilot for an English-Telugu bilingual picture dictionary for village schools in rural Andhra Pradesh.

As these examples suggest, we are especially keen to fund research into low-cost resources that will improve the learning and teaching of English in under-resourced contexts.  On completion of their research, ASHDRA awardees produce a report on their project, and seven of these reports can already be viewed on the website, each coming with a useful bite-sized summary. The awards are designed to fund research projects lasting up to two years, and the funding for any single project can be as much as £15,000. The size of the award depends on the scale of the research, and ASHDRA awards have ranged from less than £1,000 right up to the maximum figure.

Our next Call for Proposals goes out in January 2024, so keep an eye on the website. Spread the word to your friends and colleagues, and above all do put in an application if you have an interesting research idea that meets the criteria.

Reference               

Palmer, H. 1933, quoted in A.P. Cowie, English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners. Oxford, OUP. 1999: 52-53.

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